It was inevitable that the antiseptic NASCAR-barbecue gobbledegook shoved up the public nose by these guys’ debut LP was only going to lead to intolerable stupidness. Their self-titled debut had some subtlety to it, whatever, even a progressive side, but this self-congratulatory pander-fest is the purest 24-karat dud of one-dimensional suckage the trio could have ever hoped to perpetrate. The interplay between Charles Kelley and Hillary Scott’s vocals is less Kelley-centric and more democratic, eventually leading to — I don’t know, the overall effect is like listening on in horror as the top three country-centric contestants on American Idol do a big finale for their nursing home audience, and that especially goes for cowboy-rock slow-dance ballad “Just a Kiss,” a worst-possible-case scenario that could be mistaken for a duet between Taylor Swift and Glen Frey — could you possibly gag me any harder? Meantime, despite its debatable musicality, the tumbling half-Celtic riff that powers “We Owned the Night” gets real old real fast, its hard-buffed exterior obviously the result of like 50 million layers where three would have sufficed — I thought this was supposed to be Fleetwood Mac reborn, not Whitesnake. Get this out of my face this instant. C- —Eric W. Saeger